The present invention relates generally to the field of electronic commerce and more specifically to a method of optimizing the purchasing process within a centralized or dispersed company or organization.
It is common for businesses to keep a stockroom of items that are required for their daily activities. For most businesses, these stocked items consist mainly of paper products and business machine refills: notepads, computer paper, printer ink cartridges and toner for copy machines. Such stockrooms may also include other items like paperclips and staples however, they do not include all of the items the entire business will need for production of its product or service. In order to acquire all of the materials a business needs, usually a purchaser or other employee must refer to one or more vendor catalogs.
Business product catalogs come in many different shapes, sizes and in regards to computer related item, formats. In order to stay competitive and to take advantage of electronic commerce most vendors and producers have made their product catalogs available in some electronic form. These electronic catalogs may come in the form of a Compact Disc (CD) that can be distributed to customers or the catalog information may be stored in a server that customers can access via the Internet.
In both of these cases a vendor must invest money in the production of the electronic catalogs. All of the vendor's product information must first be stored in electronic format. Then the information must be stored on a CD or in the memory of a server. In the case of a CD, the vendor must pay for mass copying of the CD followed by mass distribution, which includes gathering address information on potential customers and postage charges. When the vendor is ready to publish a new catalog, or just wants to make changes to a few items in the old catalog, the vendor must make, copy and distribute an entirely new CD. If the vendor chooses to put their catalog on-line, then they must involve themselves in setting up a website and absorb all of the costs associated with establishing and maintaining the website.
Websites typically reside on the World Wide Web, in a server for example, that is accessed via the Internet from a remote location. Multimedia documents found on the World Wide Web are called Web pages. Linking information together with hyperlinks is accomplished by special computer programs or computer languages. Computer languages used to create Web pages are HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and JAVA. A multimedia device should have a keyboard and a pointing device, such as a mouse or pen, so that the user can direct the associations between multimedia elements.
Photographs, drawings, and other still images must be changed into a format that the computer can manipulate and display. Such formats include bit-mapped graphics and vector graphics. Bit-mapped graphics store, manipulate, and represent images as rows and columns of tiny dots. In a bit-mapped graphic, each dot has a precise location described by its row and column, much like each house in a city has a precise address. Some of the most common bit-mapped graphics formats are called Graphical Interchange Format (GIF), Tagged Image File Format (TIFF), and Windows Bitmap (BMP). Vector graphics use mathematical formulas to recreate the original image. In a vector graphic, the dots are not defined by a row-and-column address, rather they are defined by their spatial relationships to one another. Because their dot components are not restricted to a particular row and column, vector graphics can reproduce images more easily and thus provide better output on most video screens and printers. Common vector graphics formats are Encapsulated Postscript (EPS), Windows Metafile Format (WMF), Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language (HPGL), and Macintosh graphics file format (PICT).
A modem, which stands for modulator-demodulator, is the device that connects a computer to a telephone line and allows information to be transmitted to or received from another computer. Each computer that sends or receives information must be connected to a modem. The information sent from one computer is converted by the modem into an audio signal, which is then transmitted by telephone lines to the receiving modem, which converts the signal into information that the receiving computer can understand. Handshaking is the term used for the signal acknowledging that communication or the transfer of information can take place. Handshakes can be controlled by either hardware or software.
The Internet and most intranets are based on the concept of a client-server relationship between computers, also called a client/server architecture. To access information on the Internet or an intranet, a user must first log on, or connect, to the client computer's host network. This connection can be established with or without user intervention depending on the software. Once a connection has been established, the user may request information from or send information to a remote server. If the information requested by the user resides on one of the computers on the host network, that information is quickly retrieved and sent to the user's terminal. If the information requested by the user is on a server that does not belong to the host Local Area Network (LAN), then the host network connects to other networks until it makes a connection with the network containing the requested server. In the process of connecting to other networks, the host may need to access a router, a device that determines the best connection path between networks and helps networks to make connections. Once the client computer makes a connection with the server containing the requested information, the server sends the information to the client in the form of a file. A special computer program called a browser enables the user to view the file. Examples of Internet browsers are Mosaic, Netscape, and Internet Explorer. Non-multimedia documents do not need browsers to view their text-only contents and many multimedia documents provide access to text-only versions of their files. The process of retrieving files from a remote server to the user's terminal is called downloading. The process sending files to a remote server from a user's terminal is called uploading.
No matter what electronic format a vendor chooses, CD or website, each is flawed, in that neither one can fulfill all of the needs of all of the employees of a given company or organization. It is virtually impossible for a medium or large sized company to find one vendor's catalog that can provide all of the products that are required by that medium or large company.